Gary Kemp has a recurring dream. He's standing at the foot of a mountain, full of trepidation about the ascent but concerned it might defeat him.

A keen walker in his waking hours, he's never had anyone analyse this reverie. "Oh come on," he says. "It would be a complete waste of money. I mean, it's kind of obvious, isn't it?"

Indeed. In the past few months Kemp has been on the emotional equivalent of a three peaks challenge.

First, the career Kilimanjaro of putting the five famously fractious members of Spandau Ballet back together.

Then, the emotional Everest of losing both parents within a few hours of each other, quickly followed by the joy of the birth of his baby son Kit.

Spandau Ballet who, perhaps more than any other band, typified everything that was glorious and preposterous about the 1980s, split up in 1989, but Kemp never stopped thinking about performing with the band again.

"I've heard stories about men who fought at Dunkirk who couldn't adjust to normal life when they returned home because it just wasn't exciting enough for them. The problem for us was that we spent 18 years not talking to each other."

It pains him to say it (mainly because Duran/Spandau were the Blur/Oasis rivals of their day) but going to see Duran Duran at a sold-out Wembley Arena a couple of years ago really got him going again: "I was jealous."

With drummer John Keeble acting as his Henry Kissinger, Kemp became a driven man, negotiating terms with the crucial but thorny singer Tony Hadley. After two years of precarious arbitration Spandau were back again.

Then, just as the tour was about to be announced and only weeks before the birth of his son, Gary was knocked sideways by a double tragedy.

His father, Frank, 79, a retired printer, suffered a heart attack and died in hospital, spending his last few moments cradled in his son's arms. "If there is a proper way for a father to go," says Gary, "then dying in your eldest son's arms seems right somehow. It sounds odd to say, but I'm glad it happened that way."

It then fell to his brother Martin and Gary to inform their 77-year-old mother Eileen of her husband's passing as she came out of anaesthetic in the same hospital following a triple heart bypass.

"I believe my mother would have survived the operation had it not been for my father dying," he says. "There was this moment after we told her when she said: 'I have no regrets,' and I knew she had given up."

There was, Kemp says, a cyclic poetry to their almost simultaneous demise. "It was incredibly romantic - these two people who had been in inseparable since they first met dying within a few hours of each other."

Since then, the bond between Gary and Martin has become tighter. "I was close to Martin but not always particularly friendly. When we were in the band we would fight regularly," he says.

It hurts that his father, who was a big fan of the band, won't be there to see him perform again. "He was so excited that we'd re-formed and really looking forward to seeing us again," he says. "When the band was at its height all our parents used to come on tour and hang out together. Now, there aren't many of them left."

The upside of all this is the way that the truth of mortality has spurred the band on to make a proper go of things.

"Tony Hadley told me that he knew he had done the right thing by agreeing to come back when my parents died. It was a sign that life was too short to carry on any sort of feud," says Gary.

As recently as a year ago things were very different for Gary Kemp. After several abortive attempts to get the band to re-form (including a rumoured request from Bob Geldof for them to play at Live 8), Kemp resigned himself to a future as an ex-rock star.

Tony Hadley was still smarting from the bitter and costly 1999 court case that saw him and fellow band members Steve Norman and John Keeble losing out to Kemp for a share of the band's songwriting royalties, and Hadley remained obdurately uncooperative. "It was the original line-up or nothing for me," he shrugs.

So, having acted on screen in The Krays and The Bodyguard, he turned to occasional film and theatre work. "My family became my priority and my career was all down to the whim of a producer or director who might want me in a play or a film," he explains. "I am a control freak. Anyone who had a look at my house would see that I like everything in its right place."

No wonder Sadie Frost (his first wife, whom he was married to from 1988 to 1995) left him, he'll tell you. "We were living in a house which was full of my Arts and Crafts furniture and paintings, and I don't think I allowed her to change anything.

"There were times when I was heartbroken about the failure of my marriage but eventually I learned to enjoy single life. I devoted myself to bringing up my son."

Kemp, now 49, lives with his second wife, fashion stylist Lauren Barber, 17 years his junior, their two children Milo and Kit, and Fin, Gary's 18-year-old son by Frost.

He maintains a civilised relationship with Frost but enjoys a close friendship with Jude Law, Frost's second husband, ironically the man for whom she left him.

"I've learned that during a divorce it is essential to keep communicating no matter what," he says. "You have to put your children first and make sure you never make them feel guilty for sometimes loving one parent more than the other."

Gary and Lauren Kemp have been "pretty much inseparable" since they started dating nine years ago. "Not long after we met we hunted for the new house (a grand, terraced job in Fitzrovia).

"She added some of her 1950s and modern furniture, and we've made it our home ... I hope I've learned my lesson since Sadie."

Has his attitude to band politics had a similar makeover? "The controlling side of my character is something that I have had to slightly relinquish," he admits. The first time around, Kemp's single-minded approach caused friction in the ranks. Sometimes he even clashed with Martin.

"But it was useful to have a sibling in the band because I knew that if I ever left the room and left Martin behind, the rest of the band would never dare slag me off with him still around. It's different now. This time it's much more comfortable. There's nothing to lose, really."

When they first met up after their extended hiatus, says Kemp, a sensibly mature glasnost pervaded.

Conservative Party stalwart Tony Hadley now has a bantering, text-message relationship with card-carrying Labour man Gary. There were some frank exchanges but no apologies. "Why should anyone apologise?" he says incredulously. "We all thought we were right." Gary's official line on the still-sensitive court case is that it is "a private matter".

It is easy to see how Kemp must have hated all the attention during the case and the subsequent attention on his private life during the great Primrose Hill media scrum of the early Noughties.

But perhaps not so easy to imagine this aesthete who reads Jung and Dickens, and dresses in Savile Row, as a hotel room-wrecking rock star.

He confesses that there is a side to his character "that doesn't belong in a rock band".

He's been thinking about all this a lot recently, holed up in his tiny Cotswold cottage as he puts the finishing touches to a self-penned autobiographical history of Spandau Ballet which began life as a subversive art statement, before mutating into a band that sold more than 20 million albums.

"Sometimes we get ridiculed about what we wore. But if you are laughing, what sort of youth did you have? Isn't being young the time to be looking ridiculous, to be stepping out with a swagger?"